


this flimsy thing

by transversely



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 11:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1467793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He finished the game. They won 7-1. The net held, and as they collided and cheered in the dugout Kazuki pulled him close, broke the oldest superstition in baseball, and said it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this flimsy thing

**Author's Note:**

> I've used this structure before in another fandom and wanted to do it again, which is probably some kind of fanfic self-plagiarism, but there it is. As always thanks to tumblr user kasukabes for commiserating endlessly about the young gentlemen of Tosei with me and informing my opinions!
> 
> enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Each life converges to some center.

-Emily Dickinson

 

 

 

 

* * *

 **3 years before**  

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

The day Kazuki said what he did about the perfect game they were playing against the rogue team at the Saitama Junior Rotary Club, established in the famous 1957 summer when Kaneda Masaichi had pitched his own and who to this day turned up at games in caps that had a jewel on them like the infamous Tosei diamond, which according to Kazuki was an allusion to the double meaning of _jewel_ and _perfect_ in the characters for _kanpeki_ —as though they’d had something to do with the perfect game! But it was true that when you read _est._ _1957_ in their briefing booklet that was the first thing you thought of, and you’d face the JunRota pitcher at the plate with the 27 fruitless at-bats in Kaneda’s game unspooling in your mind against your will. So it could have been true: you could own the history of something you’d never been a part of. 

Regardless of who owned it Tosei guillotined their momentum early enough to render it irrelevant, anyway. The leadoff lost his own head by looking at a ball that on sheer luck came out the most beautiful sinker Junta had ever thrown: a graceful, pro-level skimmer with a fifteen-centimeter break that even from the mound looked the way a violin glissando sounded, and after that it was all downhill. 

Kazuki led him straight down the line. It was like a pianist laddering through arpeggios. He threw metronomically. Checked the runners, pivoted, let loose shuttles of speed so that by the fourth inning it felt like there was a cats’ cradle of silver lines pulled taut between his right hand and Kazuki’s. The rapport in the glove sounded like a shout. They took no timeouts and threw no extraneous balls. His glide off the mound felt suggestive; the rewound step back almost coy. In the eighth inning, he got hit, and a groan went up from the stands, but he was held apart by that net of silver lines, that effortless, warmly communicative silence.

He finished the game. They won 7-1. The net held, and as they collided and cheered in the dugout Kazuki pulled him close, broke the oldest superstition in baseball, and said it.

He didn’t hear it fully; only caught enough to know that it’d been something about a perfect game and that it had had his name in it. The entire tingling afternoon and its victory centrifuged around the phrase, warming and dewing the inside of his ear—and then Kazuki squeezed his bicep a little self-consciously and slipped past him into the milling cacophony of boys and Junta was left looking out of the dugout, off-balance and a little thunderstruck. The last time the horn had sounded, he was a fourteen-year-old with a halfway decent sinker; now he’d been anointed: he was going to pitch a perfect game.

He carried the phrase up the dugout steps, into the lee of the water cooler where Kazuki’s glance hit him the same way the sunlight through the water did. The sound of the chime under the blaring horn solidified. He slipped past Kazuki with the gentleness of the water on his skin; his wrist was cool, and Kazuki’s went hot when he brushed it. The sun slanted like a dial throwing a heat up in his cheeks, the blood sweetening and heating under his skin. He went past him more slowly than he needed to.

They looked at each other; they smiled, they looked away. It was bubblingly sunny.

“Not bad out there,” he said, “Kazu-san.”

“Oh, well, same to you.” His veins brimmed with joy, or terror. “You were—great.” Kazuki’s hand looked like it was going to grab his and then fluttered back to his belt, playing with the catch. Junta smiled and ducked his head. “Amazing.” There was a clean spill of sunlight on the tile in front of them, like a twist of sheets. “You’re—all-around great.”

Junta wanted to step around it but instead he let the tip of his shoe skirt the edge. Real sheets would have gone dirty under his spikes, but the light was soft and peachlike, perfectly white, and gilded the toe of his shoe instantly. A sense memory skated across his skin: the immediate enveloping sensation of applause.

“We work together kind of well, don’t we?”

“Kind of well?”

“Kind of—great!”

They laughed then. There was a feeling there, and he didn’t know what it was, but the laugh bookended it the way nothing they’d said had.

“So—Junta, do you think you’d like to—in high school—“

“Yes! Yes, of course…”

There were people all the way up and down the stairs, beads slipping on an abacus, but their conversation was so mundane no one was listening. Junta thought of looking past the batsmen to Kazuki’s squinting eyes behind the mask, the trajectory of the coming pitch communicated and suspended there like that, unknown yet to anybody else on the field; he thought: _oh_. Suddenly he remembered the clamminess of Kazuki’s shirt under the catcher gear, and felt a little shy.

“Well, anyway,” he said, to cover his exhilarated consternation. “Those hats they had…weren’t they funny? Kaneda-sensei’s perfect game…” and the way Kazuki dipped his head to smile himself made Junta brave, so he could dredge up the half-heard phrase, something so preposterous it could only have been said into a teammate’s sweaty shoulder after a victory. ”So Kazu-san thinks I could?”

“Throw a perfec—”

“ _Don’t_ say it again!”

Kazuki was standing on a lower step, and he was looking up at him. That was how he looked from the mound.

It’d felt indecent then and it felt indecent now, again, out here in the open, but after all there was still that distance between them, like the mound and the batter’s box. Junta looked at the sunlight held up giddily between them, an oval plane of liquid jittering in a raised glass; his head felt light. Kazuki said, “Hmm—you’ve got an unusual sinker, haven’t you? I mean—I think it’s an amazing pitch. Kind of glamorous.”

“I’m right-handed…it’s not very good.”

“That’s not true!” The immediacy of it startled them both and they stepped back, away from the oblong of quivering light on the steps. “Junta, that’s—not true. It’s—”

“Great?”

“It’s _great_!”

When you made Kazuki laugh it was like handing him your juice box to open because you didn’t want it to get everywhere and waste half of it. When you made Kazuki laugh, you got it all back, the sweetness contained between your hands safe in the pocket of secrecy, something to be shared and passed between the two of you until it was all gone, but even then it stayed condensed in your stomach, its gravity rounded down and glowing like a fruit. Junta drank it all down, stepping lightly and a little further into the swathes of sun at Kazuki’s feet. Gathered into a protective ring of vibrating light. 1957, Kaneda Masaichi was throwing his perfect game for the mediocre Kokutetsu Swallows in their first year with their reinstated old name, with only occasional reliance on the incredible lefty sinker it’d taken Junta months to learn with his right hand, making himself a history the way you signed your name in your composition book or chose your class schedule for high school. Something like that, you could never tell when it’d happen. You had to be prepared to think any day could be your July 21st, 1957, because if someone else could have one obviously you would as well, it was only a matter of time.

The sunlight laddered out before him like stair steps, endlessly, brightly upward, uninterrupted. Facets of the diamond on the JunRota batsmen’s helmets. Even then he’d wanted to laugh, because if the best you could come up with to make yourself a crest was a story that had already happened, there was no reason for anyone to be afraid of you. How could you not want to laugh? How could you not want your own coming history?

“Don’t say it again,” said Junta, “but it’s—wonderful!”

“What is it now?”

“Ah, I just—“ He put his hand over his mouth, and then his eyes. He couldn’t bear to be so happy. “Kazu-san—isn’t there so much left for us to do?”

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 years after**

* * *

 

 

 

 

He recognized the bag first. It had a cell phone strap in place of one buckle and was made of blue and yellow nylon, the kind you wrapped outdoor gear in, and across one placket there was a motivational saying from the pitcher Kaneda Masaichi in aggressively utilitarian typeface. They had gotten the bags at a baseball exhibition at the Saitama Prefectural Dome; most people had replaced the saying, but Junta had scored an emphasis box around his in corrective pen, cutting off half the words, and the other half was usually covered by the way he swung his palm over it, thumb snagged in the pocket with his keys, wallet, phone, folded yen, all the trappings of his pretenses at responsibility prone to tumbling out when he swung around, dislodging them all the way he did now, decoupaging the sidewalk with proof that the old habit was still there. 

“It’s you!” said Junta, breathless. “It’s—“

“Me!” said Kazuki, helping him pick the things up, “ah, I—hi there. It’s good to see you!”

“It’s good to see _you_ , Kazu-san!”

They stood in the street and Junta wrapped a lanyard around his wrist, folded up his yen and put them meticulously back into the bag. He was wearing loden-colored work boots and there was a slash of what looked like marker on his cheek, but his eyes were alert, and they were looking at Kazuki.

He let the moment congeal between them, and then Junta said, “The lantern festival was the last time, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. I guess—about five months ago. You were only home for a day…”

 “How are your siblings?”

“Same as ever. Working hard. And Junichi?”

“He’s fine, happy. He entered high school this year. Your mother sent a charm for him.”

“That’s…does he still play baseball?”

“He doesn’t. But you know my brother, he’ll find a way to use the luck on something else.”

The look Junta gave him was clean. Someone who’d done a mundane transaction for him, handing back exact change. Kazuki felt like he was waiting for something but nothing came, only an echoing sense of vague exhaustion that let him shift his own umbrella, listening to the rain on it, and ask Junta’s reflection in the shop window, “And what about you, do you still play?" 

“No. Well, you know, there’s always—”

“So much left to do.”

Junta smiled.  “I should have known Kazu-san would know the right words.”

Until he’d switched into the formality Kazuki hadn’t registered that he’d stopped using it. “Come on, I’d have told you after you graduated, too, if you’d—“he tested out a few phrases experimentally, like signs, but looking at Junta’s eyes now they didn’t have that diamond-hardened, fragmentary focus they’d had watching him from the mound; they were just drawn and tired in his wan face, gently satisfied like any university student’s. It shouldn’t have, but it made it easier. “If you’d wanted. But I—hope things are better for you now.”

He realized as he said it that it wasn’t a pleasantry: he did hope. It’d been years but he could see Junta receive his hope, too, turn it over gently, set it aside.

“They’re better, Kazu-san. I hope—for you too. I know they weren’t. I didn’t…think about it that way then.”

The wash of the street was metal blue-green, a corona of streetlights puncturing the haze of rain. A thin drift of water whipped the flap of his jacket and the collar of the shirt underneath it. For a summer monsoon it was unexpectedly cold. He’d go home to his apartment with its cinderblock floors and brew tea in the darkened kitchen, having resolved not to turn on the lights until six. Taking indulgence instead from his ability to hold to that resolve as other lights went on in his building. Already he could feel the clamminess on his skin from the weather, something that was usually rendered bearable by one or two brisk circumnavigations of his apartment, but today seemed insurmountable. To delay it Kazuki set his shoulders and asked, “Is there—how do you feel about it?”

“I guess I don’t know yet. But it’s good you asked.”

It was good he’d answered. “You’ve changed a lot, Junta.”

“Haha—my parents would be happy to hear it, Kazu-san! Maybe you heard, I failed three entrance exams, and had to ronin for a year. I wasn’t very good at concentrating on them, I guess…anyway, I went to cram school again when Rio did. I studied English with him, you know he’s only good at that _one_ subject but it was the one I needed—things tended to work out for me that way—and then...” he spread his fingers, expansively, on the pommel of his umbrella, as if startled. “Then I did it!”

“Junta—“ he looked at him, the bag laden casually with the detritus of his new life, those old eyes. He realized suddenly that like this, a phase of his life was over. “From the bottom of my heart, I’m happy for you.”

“Thank you, Kazu-san. Ah—I should be going, I’ve got work today again.”

“Oh…of course. Are we going the same way?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Check your bag, do you have every—“ he bit his lip. And Junta laughed then, just the way he had as a child and then a teenager. Kazuki could have closed his eyes, but now he kept them open, letting the rain blow in under his umbrella. Beyond the two of them the tides of pedestrians on the rainswept road kept going in opposite directions, lives in small boxes but nonetheless what they had to go home to; Junta was laughing, and he was one of them too. He’d thought it impossible.

He walked towards the curb. Just as the traffic signal had changed to white Junta said “Kazu-san!” and he turned back. The afterimages of laughter were still bright on his face, like a transparency, but there was a stillness in his eyes now, the same as there had been when he’d thrown his near no-hitter as a seventh grader. Presaging the way the street would flood with quiet when the rain would stop. 

“I never did it,” he said. “I couldn’t pitch a perfect game.”

“I know that,” said Kazuki. “Even without that—working with you…it really was. Great.”

“Ah…thank you.” 

“You really should get going, now…”

“I am! But—come back here, tomorrow, same time. I have something of yours to give back to you.”

“Oh. Not—going to keep it?”

There was that laugh again: nothing had changed; everything had. The lights of the city reflected in Junta’s eyes were lights from over his shoulder, the place he’d left behind.  The hush would be total, he knew. The silence suffused with wait, life sated temporarily, the pause before the soaked blue of the daily world swept in again.

“No,” said Junta. “No, I don’t need it anymore.”

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 months before**

* * *

 

 

 

 

As soon as he caught it, he knew the coach had noticed. He straightened up and sucked his bottom lip into his mouth. The whistle sounded for a long time out, people started spooling back into the dugout for water, and Kazuki got up and jogged over to him. Junta waited for him to say something, but he only gave him an uneasy smile and turned to look at their coach making his way across the field. 

“It’s only halfway through,” said Kazuki when he got there. “And this last at-bat, he got ahead in the count right away—“

“You’re damn right he did,” said the coach. “Why do you think I called time? He wasn’t even sweating it. He could have done it any time during the last four innings—“

“Because he’s on form now! He’s…you know how he is, he takes his time …“

The coach looked at Junta. “That true? You took four innings to get on form today, and then you just crackerjacked it? In one at-bat?”

Junta looked away and made a nautilus motion on the mound with the heel of his shoe, round and round like the coach’s voice going into his ear ricocheting down his cochlea. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two Kurehigashi pitchers flinch at what he was doing, and stopped. “No.”

“There you go, then. Kawai, two days, you’ll be playing on the Koshien mound, not a goddamn sandbox. That means these guys—“ he fanned his arm out, encompassing the kids all the way at the outfield, “need to be seeing a Koshien battery _right now_."

“Tosei isn’t a sandbox,” said Junta. Both of them looked at him. He shrugged. “Please don’t be hard on our field…it’s not a sandbox…”

Kazuki shepherded him back to the dugout. The thing Junta loved watching about practice games was how nobody paid any attention to boundaries and everyone trickled in and out of one another’s dugouts arbitrarily, forming bizarre little alliances that would later make the dividing up of chores in the practice camp easier, the sleepovers more raucous. Yama-chan was drawing a gundam on the Kurehigashi shortstop’s glove. One of their tiny reserve pitchers was hitching a ride on Rio’s back, both wearing dazed, enchanted smiles. It made Junta want to jump on them, and he was about to go do it when Kazuki cleared his throat. He looked back at him dolefully.

“When did you feel ready to throw on form today?”

“Second inning,” said Junta. He’d never been able to stall him off. Kazuki let out a thoughtful exhale from between his teeth, like a train whistle.

“You’re not going to say anything?”

“No. I did something wrong. I don’t want to make it like I didn’t.”

“That’s not the p—were you all right? Want to lie down?” Kazuki had taken off his cap and was holding it against the sun so it blared out around it like an eclipse. Junta had his own, but if anyone had asked him right then he would have said that all the shade came from Kazuki’s. He shook his head. He waited for Kazuki to ask him, and he didn’t, so of his own volition he took off his glove and said, “I was going to pitch really well. If I’d started pitching from the second inning. Actually, I think it was going to be— _you know_.”

“See, that’s what I’d have thought,” said Kazuki. “You felt good. Your pitches! In my glove, I mean! They—felt good.” As a child Junta had had a rag doll that had been hugged so often the paint on half her face had smeared so she’d looked a little confused all the time, and that was what Kazuki’s face was like now, mottled by his blush. “You probably would’ve thrown a—”

“Yeah.”

The phantom phrase always unlocked them: felt like the turning point of every conversation. Junta had felt the same years ago during that middle school game with the rotary club, Kazuki pressing the idea into the lee of his neck, tattooing it there so he was marked with it now. He looked down and away. The shade cast by Kazuki’s baseball cap felt nearly corporeal, like he could lean into it.

“Mm,” said Kazuki, quietly. “It’s no problem. If you don’t want to think about it that way—“

“I do! I do want to think about it that way! It’s just—Kazu-san—“

“In two days we’re going to play at Koshien, is that it?”

“Tosei isn’t a sandbox,” said Junta, thought about how to phrase it, settled on directness, “but—I don’t know anything about Koshien.”

Kazuki smiled. “Okay,” he said, like he was telling himself something. “Okay, don’t—here, let me—“ He took off his catchers’ helmet. “Gonna go give this to Rio. If you could go tell Suzuhara about that issue we had with the leadoff, you know—that little step in he did. I think he can get through the next five innings all right with his—“

“—forkball?”

“Yep.” They smiled at each other. “And then—if it’s all right with you—“ _yes,_ Junta wanted to say, _yes, yes, anything—I don’t care, it’s all right with me_ “—meet me out by the buses in fifteen minutes.” For a moment he looked like he was going to touch Junta’s cheek, where a crescent slice of sun had slipped around his hat, and then he thought better of it and pulled his hand back courteously. “Bring, um, sunscreen—haha…”

He forgot to bring sunscreen. They bought it at a drugstore on the way back into Kobe, in a little orange bag into which the pharmacist slipped a handful of honeydew candies when he saw their baseball caps. It was about a twenty-minute train ride from Kurehigashi and from there the usual twelve minutes on the Hanshin metro line. It was unusual, but Junta was sure everyone on the metro was wearing peach or blush orange—all softer, heartfelt reds. “Kazu-san!” he said, “Kazu-san, remember when I was in middle school, and—our classes saw each other at the Prefectural Auto Museum—and we went home together, because it was so far—“

“I remember!”

They grinned at one another, hanging off the metro’s steadying handles, and the grin went between the distance between them like a sign, like all the signs Kazuki had given him over the last two years that gathered under Junta’s breastbone now, fluttering there as they went out into the city, swinging their messenger bags. They crossed the street to the stadium, floating on the throng of people in giddy white and orange. Kazuki worried that they were in the wrong colors and offered to buy him a shirt, but they agreed they should do that when the entire team came in two days, and instead they got a long orange and white streamer for free at a stationery store—a piece of giftwrap, probably—which in a fit of excitement Junta wrapped around Kazuki’s wrist to keep out of harm’s way. They didn’t go inside the stadium but they bought the Koshien sausage bento and sat on the divide near the ticket boots to unwrap it. Junta ate bite after bite of the lively, haphazardly spiced thing, the kind of carelessly tossed meal you’d make if you were going to feed hundreds of people—thousands of them—and he watched them all go by, into the stadium, all attired in the same orange and white that snagged on his watch when Kazuki offered to take his daikon if he didn’t want to eat it. Junta looked at them, he looked at Kazuki’s blue baseball cap: he understood what Kazuki had been trying to tell him. It was nothing like Tosei. It was everything like Tosei. That was why he was safe.

The entire sky was orange when they walked back to the station. They didn’t take the metro. It had an air of something daring about it, because when they came with their team they’d take the metro, because that was what you did at Koshien. Kazuki made Junta stand next to a flickering streetlight with a banner displaying the names of the teams on it, and Junta put his hand under Tosei’s name, although no one could see it, and made a v for victory for a picture for Rio.

“I almost don’t want to,” said Kazuki before he took the picture. He was laughing a little self-consciously. “I mean—it’s really a lovely evening, right? It’s almost—unfair to take a picture, and say this was what it looked like.”

“Don’t take it.”

“You think so?”

“That’s why I didn’t pitch well.”

Kazuki didn’t say anything for a few moments. He helped Junta down from the concrete platform under the streetlight. He disentangled the streamer from Junta’s watch absently the way he’d been doing all day. The streetlight crackled. They walked a little further alongside the metro track, parallel to but never intersecting with the great crush of humanity that barrelled back and forth to Koshien every day, a little at a time; they couldn’t see one another but could hear their breathing, aloft in the pleasant darkness, and Junta thought: this was what it looked like.

“If I’d thrown well,” he said, more into that beautiful darkness and the mildness of the evening than to any one person in particular, “maybe it’d have been a no-hitter. And then, you know. It would get worse, not better. The feeling. Every inning, everyone on the field waiting for me to drop the streak.”

“You’re good enough now for people to believe you could throw one.”

“I think so. And—you think so.”

He would have used his name to put some distance between them; the presumption of the statement itself felt so jarringly intimate, but this was baseball. They were a battery and under that sanction it was acceptable to talk this way. If it hadn’t been for Kazuki the perfect game wouldn’t have been something that occupied his thoughts at all, and now he felt the perverse urge to hold him accountable for it, make him understand what it was like: the sharpening of attention, the mounting siren of the chime as your concentration refit itself into an infinity mirror. The odds of throwing one were less than nine hundredths of a percent, but on the mound even this concession to statistical inevitability felt generous.

There was a terror there, of what you would be when you came out on the other side of something so impossible, or worse, what you would be when your own error forsook it. Easier then to sabotage it at the very beginning. Easier to foreclose your own streak, and make it up in the later innings of the game, unveiling skill then that was only a good talent and not an extraordinary one: enough to keep you on the mound, and not to open up questions of the future.

“I don’t want to hope for it and ruin it,” he said. He wondered suddenly if they knew where they were, where they were going. They should have taken the train. “But I’ll ruin it. Kazu-san—it’s—“

“You’re afraid of it?” said Kazuki, so lightly Junta put his hand over his eyes. He felt like he was weeping, though he wasn’t. “Look over here--ah, I—I mean, you don’t have to…”

“Kazu-san, I _know_ I don’t have to, I don’t nod for you because I _have_ to,” said Junta. “I _want_ to do that! Like Kaneda-sensei, I—how could it hurt me…if I didn’t…” 

They’d crested a hill rilled by bicycle racks and come out onto an open granite walkway, at the center of which was a quiescent fountain lit by orange and white. It was impossible to forget here, where you were. It was like Tosei, you were always wrapped and tethered by its historied colors but Junta had loved Tosei since he saw it, the rituals and the familiarity that held you secure in an otherwise incomprehensible array of possibilities, and like every child in the country he loved Koshien now too, for the same reason.

“You don’t have to do it now,” said Kazuki next to him. He was at a reserved distance, watching the fountain, but his words felt like they’d bubbled up from inside Junta’s chest. “You can do it next time—we’ll be back here. In the summer.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.” When he was young Kazuki used to swing his arms rigorously to work off energy and prevent himself from doing whatever Junta and Rio were doing, running madly or embarrassing their parents; this was what he was doing now. It’d calmed Junta since he was a child and he let it do the same thing now. “Let this one be your warm-up, if you want one.”

“Nobody gets a warm-up.”

“You should have one,” said Kazuki, immediate as if he’d pressed a key. “Junta—“ he bit his lip. “You—should have anything you want.”

The streamer got caught in his watch again. He didn’t disentangle it this time, but worked his fingers down into the loosely tied knot. If either of them moved it would have pulled tight and gotten messy, but as it was it was manageable, held their fingers in close enough proximity to one another without contact. He was more grateful than he had ever been for anything that they hadn’t taken the train. After a moment the fountain burbled, and lit arcs of water fireworked into the sky. 

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 months after**

* * *

 

 

 

 

Junta had put his overnight things in his Tosei duffel, which struck Kazuki as in inexpressibly poor taste, but he took the familiar thing from him anyway and carried it all the way to the train station. It occurred to him as he was swiping his transit card that Junta probably hadn’t thought of it this way and the thought made the wind feel a little sour, but he damped it down so fiercely he was only drained when he turned around back to face him. 

“It’s so great that you came for the practice exam,” he said. “It’s—it was like a vacation! Didn’t you think so?”

Junta had on a track jacket Kazuki recognized as Take’s with one sleeve rolled up and the other pulled down over his chapped knuckles. Towards the end of the bus ride he’d put a strip of lurid-looking watermelon gum in his mouth and it was impossible to think he’d wanted to do anything but forestall conversation. At the café where they waited he’d clipped his hair back and read morosely from one of the three Kawabata novels that rotated through his bag in circulation. This was like Junta; it would get in his eyes but he would never cut it. It was September, the wind already gilded with winter, and he wouldn’t have thought to bring his own windbreaker because someone would inevitably give him one.

“Next time you might ask Shingo and Yama-chan to come home with you,” said Junta. “You can come and see us play, we’re playing Sakitama in our first practice game. They’re not a good team.”

“You shouldn’t say that.” There was nothing new about the small arrogance except what it did to him now; he recalled with a faint sense of astonishment that he used to find it charming. “And I know you’re playing them, I set it up for you with Tai-san. Next time, do you think you’ll want to go to dinner again with him and—everyone?” The strap of the duffel felt heavy. He shifted it and let his shoulder take the small burn. “They’d all love to know you better.”

“Why?”

“Well, you and I—“

It’d been a trap. He’d been stupid to fall for it, and now he couldn’t backtrack. A passing train shuddered the platform under his feet, mirroring the feeling of his frustration so precisely he felt completely disoriented.

“We played together,” he finished lamely.

He’d had a chance to choose the most important thing, and he’d chosen it without accounting for how denuded it sounded now, when on the field it encapsulated everything with no further need for communication. The bow of Junta’s shoulders drew together unhappily under the borrowed jacket. At Koshien, on that impromptu trip to the stadium, Junta had wrapped the dirty stationery streamer around his wrist; it was a little embarrassing but he remembered the readiness with which he’d grabbed his hand, not a moment of hesistance. Please don’t be afraid of the world, he wanted to say, as he’d said to Junta with every sign since childhood, waiting for his nod. You’re— _you_ , can’t you see, there’s nothing at all you might have to be afraid of. No one had touched him like that before or since—you couldn’t do it, really, not unless you were clear on where you stood. A pitcher and a catcher—it was clear where they stood. You knew how to answer that question. You couldn’t get—trapped.

“Why go so far for exams,” said Junta. “Why not apply to universities closer to home.”

“I just thought it was time to start,” he said. The sentiment coalesced as he said it. “Living in the world, you know. Like an adult.”

“Kazu-san doesn’t think I’m an adult.”

“Junta, I _didn’t_ say—“ he paused. “You didn’t—have to act like one when I was there.“ 

“Why do _you_ get to say that?”

Because I had my things together in the dugout before you even moved, Kazuki thought. Because I gave the cranes to that first year captain and looked him in the eye, and you couldn’t do the same for me again until came to practice to see you. Because I give the sign to you, and I’m the one who waits for you to nod. Because I have gotten up every day and gone to cram school taking a jacket and an umbrella for the cold, I haven’t been outside in a single one of the sunsets you play in every day, and because you skipped one week of those sunsets because you have your choice of luxuries. Because you won’t acknowledge we were supposed to be _even_ in our luxuries, because we were the best battery, and that is what that means. And if we weren’t a good battery—if _that_ is taken to be true—then I wasn’t a good catcher, and what was I (what am I) then?

"Well—because you won’t say _anything_.” 

It'd come out wrong. He tried again, in fits and starts. “You won’t even say that you want to throw a perfect game—even if you want it more than anyone—you can’t even say the _words_ , how can you expect—“

“Kazu-san!” 

“No, listen to me,” in dread he could hear himself slipping into the deadened reasonable tone he’d used to draw his Toseis out of the dugout, don’t make the next team wait, keep moving, keep going, grow up. “You’re—I think I know now, you’re afraid of—growing. You want perfection, you don’t want to endure the things you’ll be before you get there, you’d rather hang on to whatever flimsy—I’m _telling_ you there will be something better, but you, you’ve _never_ thought that anyone else would be afraid too—“

“I _did_! I _have_ , for you, always, I—I’m not afraid of the sinker anymore, I threw—”

“That was baseball, it’s not—“ where had it _come_ from, this feeling? were they standing closer or further apart? “—don’t…think it’s like real life.”

They’d made a contract never to voice things like that outside the distance from Junta’s eyes to his own across the mound, and now he’d broken it. Placed Junta’s fear out in the air where anyone could hear it, without his consent, instead of letting it go between them the way a sign would, unseen to anyone else.

Take it back, he told himself. Take it back—

“Right—right.” Junta had shut his eyes. “I’m afraid. But you only know I am, because I told you.”

Kazuki flinched. “Junta—“

“No, please don’t. You’re always right—“ Junta’s hand had gone over his eyes, now he dropped it, defeated. “Maybe we should have—taken the picture, at Koshien. I’m sorry.”

“ _Junta_ —”

“I’m very, very sorry.”

A thrown, liquid light cupped the side of his face: the approaching train. They both stepped back in shock though there was no danger of the train coming near them; they were only stepping away from one another. “I told you I would ruin it,” said Junta.

He was laughing. He took his bag the way he would take a ball, that unselfconscious entitlement that used to take Kazuki’s breath away, and then he pulled the hood of his track jacket over his head and got into the train.

“Next time,” said Kazuki. “you—we should—”

Junta said, “Nobody gets a warmup.”

The pneumatic hiss sealed him inside the train. Kazuki sank back on his heels and waited there until the train began to move. He stood until it was out of sight. The wind that hit his cheeks was chill and soft as snow.

He thought that he would have done something about all of this if he’d known they would be seeing one another again soon, but that was what the summer had been for, and ultimately it had slipped out of his hands the way he could never let anything slip again. These were the things he knew: in a week he would have another practice exam, in two the fall tournament would begin and Junta wouldn’t be able to afford the distraction. In two more months the winter holidays would be upon him, then the exams, then graduation. The months ahead were set on their tracks like an oncoming train; he was still weak at calculus, his application needed formatting, proofreading, hours of investment neither of them could afford to make in one another. It was clear to him like the cleaving of his heart. After you got hit there was nothing to do but make up the difference.

When he could no longer see the light of the train he turned and zipped up his jacket all the way to his chin. It was cold, after all. No one except him would take care of his health, and he’d lose weeks if he fell sick. These were the things he knew. He’d prepared as best as he could but the future had set upon him after all. Now there was no more time.

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 weeks before**

* * *

 

 

 

 

“Nice pitching,” shouted Kazuki. “Hey, Shingo, what’s the matter, never seen a sinker before?” 

Shingo pulled his batting helmet off and rucked up his hair. “Not one like _that!_ Hey, Junta, you _sure_ that was a sinker, or you’re just inventing pitches now? Summer tournament starts in three weeks, you wanna give us a heads up?”

Junta had been wanting to laugh since Shingo had missed the sinker and now put his hand over his mouth. Shingo had made a perfect O with his lips when the pitch glided by, like it had played a trick on him, and that was what the sinker had felt like all of today, a delirious practical joke. He took his hat off and let himself succumb.

“Invented it!” he cried. “Imagine if I invented a pitch!”

“It’d be a breaking ball,” said Shingo, and waggled his eyebrows at him. “Or more like _heartbreaking_ ball, am I right, Rio?” Rio dropped an armful of knee guards on his feet— _knee_ guards! on his _feet_!—in consternation and Junta laughed harder. Kazuki waited for him to finish, smiling himself, and then Shingo scooped up the batting helmet and they jogged back out to the field where the ARC players were scattered around in their practice game uniforms, throwing their machinelike drills. In the distance the building of the Tosei athletic center was shaded with afternoon shadow, like the sidewalk touched by trees, and behind it the indistinct shapes of construction that had been progressing slowly since Junta was a sixth-grader. It was all empty crossbeams right now; it could have been anything, a physics laboratory, a beautiful greenhouse for rare plants, but Junta’s wish was for a planetarium, so that even when it was built you could look up as you could on a day like today, straight to the naked sky through the rafters, Tosei as a place from where you could see anywhere in the world. 

Kazuki walked him to the mound. The ARC catcher was berating his pitcher in a low voice over in the dugout; they watched him genially for a few warm, quiet moments. The hair on the back of Junta’s neck felt sensitive like a hand placed there. Everywhere, the unutterable promise of summer, and all of nature colluded with him: you didn’t dare speak its name until it was here, but one morning you woke up, and—it was.

“Kazu-san,” he said, “I’m—going to try for it when we get to Koshien. What we planned. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Kazuki turned to him and Junta remembered the night they’d taken the train, the lights from the fountain playing on his skin. It was full daylight now but it was all the same, the peachlike sunlight of that long-ago day when he’d nearly thrown his no-hitter, the breeze of the springtime night carrying the breaths of anticipation from Koshien stadium and stirring the streamer tangled through their fingers. The moment now when Kazuki held out the ball to him, smiling when his hand closed over it.

 “It’s only going to get better,” said Kazuki. “Take as long as you need.”

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 weeks after**

* * *

 

 

 

 

“You should come again soon,” said Rio. “You—I’m, I—“ he hunched up his shoulders, still spindly under the straps of his catcher gear, “I’m getting a lot better. I’m still having some trouble calculating where the sinker will fall, but I think that’s good, right, it means the break is growing—“ 

“You don’t have to tell me,” said Kazuki. “It’s fine, I trust you.”

“—it means—“

“ _Don’t,”_ he could have sworn he’d said it more gently, but it was out in the open like that, and now Rio was making the grimace he’d made as a child, a little acidic wince. He had, Kazuki remembered, put his Koshien soil into a little sealed cup that had a soccer ball sticker on it, and inside, an evil-smelling clump of what looked like fermented corn husks. “You should eat it,” Junta used to say blithely, “it’ll taste like natto, maybe you’ll get used to it. You still can’t eat that without—“

“It’s not natto! It’s grass from the Maracanã!”

“A soccer—“ (“ _football_ ,” howled Rio) “—stadium? Don’t put Koshien soil in there with that!”

He’d sulked spectacularly all the way back to the hotel, but in the night, as they watched a game show on the little television, he’d leaned his moppy head on Kazuki’s shoulder and trickled shower water down the neck of his shirt, turning the acorn cup over in his hands, and told them in his muttering conspiratorial voice about the Estádio do Maracanã and the flags and the facepaint, the subterranean bursts of energy that shook you all the way through the soles of your feet, the terrible home defeat in the 50s that Rio’s father still spat superstitiously at the mention of, which had its own name, the Maracanazo, and which now made Rio reach under his shirt to touch his crucifix.

“—anyway I’m going to put it _back_ ,” said Rio. “That’s what I’m going to do, when I go back to Brazil, you know. Like—‘I left, and now I’ve come back.’” 

“How can you play there if you don’t play soccer anymore?”

“Well, students don’t play there, Jun-san…I’m just going to go. To see a game again.” His eyelashes were long but nearly invisible, reddish filaments in the lamplight. He was hunched up so his head would stay on Kazuki’s shoulder, but when Kazuki looked at him all he could think was how small he was.

Every place, he’d thought then, had its talismans. Rio had taken his, Junta had taken the old streamer from him as they promised they’d be back and that was as it should be; Kazuki hadn’t bothered to take anything at all and now he had no right to say anything about any of it.  When they were young, Kazuki used to sit with Rio in his lap and hold his grasping hands up like a puppet’s—“throw it to us! A fastball!” Once Junta had hit Rio on the nose with the beanbag by accident, he hadn’t cried but only turned and blinked at Kazuki a few times in outraged, affronted puzzlement, as though he hadn’t quite registered that Junta’s pitch could hurt him; the memory of that pain denied through devotion made him easy to love, easy to remember how very like Kazuki he was, and Kazuki dredged up every ounce of that sameness now to bridge the gulf, made himself put his hand on his shoulder.

“You’re going to be a great catcher,” he said. “You’re going to lead a perfect—“

“Kazu-san, you don’t say that out loud! What if I—mess up and—”

“Then you mess up. Rio, don’t—“ his own voice was breaking now, he couldn’t stay for long. He had to go back. Over Rio’s shoulder he could see Junta watching them respectfully, at a distance. Quietly something inside him went out: he knew he wouldn’t come any closer now. Rio would go back to the Maracanã and find it changed, and he had come back to his own grounds, that still felt infuriatingly like home, and this one loss had changed them so that nothing was the same at all. “Don’t be afraid.”

Rio put his arms around him before he left, burying his face in Kazuki’s hair. Behind him Junta kept punching his fist into his soft mitt, morose and impatient, the brim of his hat shading the tip of his nose that in summer grew sunburned, uncared for. Kazuki made eye contact with him. Junta held it for a moment, let it stay, then looked away, into the unfinished structure behind the school, washed out by the setting sun.

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 days before**

* * *

 

 

 

 

The night before the summer tournament would begin they stayed after practice until their last manager had gone home, until the sunset had bled out and there were fireflies flickering in the batting cages, until the vending machine lights at the athletic center had gone out and they’d gone across the street to the construction project to sit in the violet dark, in the invisible lee of the hoped-for planetarium, and out of the pocket of his bag with the Kaneda Masaichi saying Junta had pulled out the Koshien streamer Kazuki had worn around his wrist when they’d gone there. Their lighthearted concession to the fact that they’d go back and it made him smile when he pulled it taut over one of the arclights, spangling the cement crossbeams and the shadow of their school in orange and white.     

“I keep wondering where it went,” said Kazuki. “You should give it back, haha—like—a confession. If you want a coat button from me, you know.”

He was joking, but Junta didn’t laugh for a moment, and then another. And slowly the idea stretched between them, wildly exciting and wildly inappropriate, like the sight of the familiar and loved buildings constellated with false color from the streamer.

 _Summer_ , he thought. Anything could happen, you could pitch a perfect game, you could—you _would_. The season of history, and here was theirs. How could it have been any other way?

“It’s—a deal,” Junta said. “I’ll give it back after we beat that school—the first year one. I need it until then.”

“Oh, yeah? In three days?”

“No. When I throw it. The—”

Kazuki was leaning back on his elbows. He looked relaxed and content in the dim dark. When Junta touched his cheek he opened his eyes and smiled at him. “Keep it, then,” he said. “Until you don’t need it anymore.”

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 days after**

* * *

 

 

 

 

He’d hung his uniform without the captain patch on his desk chair so he would have to look at it every time he crossed from his bed to the bathroom and now he steadied himself on it, clenching his fingers over the material, and left his message. “In the parking lot,” he repeated. “The the one behind the school. Just—tell him to meet me there, the team is worried he hasn’t been at practices, tell him,” he clenched his fist on the cloth. “Tell him he doesn’t have to bring anything. I’d just—like to see him.” 

“Kazu-chan, he doesn’t know what parking lot,” said Junta’s mother. “He said so when you called yesterday. Are you _sure_ everything is all right—“

“He knows,” said Kazuki. “It’s the one behind the school, the unfinished one. It says so on the building permit, he’s probably never read it, he—I’m sorry, Takase-san. I—please tell him.”

When he hung up he sat in the chair with his shoulders touching the cloth of the denuded uniform, the useless relic he didn’t want to keep. His desk lamp hummed.

Five runs to four. It’d been cauterized into his waking moments for a few days now and become a habit. It was a close difference. But all closeness meant was that there was still a small measure of distance, that you could trick yourself into thinking there wasn’t, and that would eventually pry you apart because you hadn’t noticed it. It was oneness that was  the goal. That was what they had never had but he felt it now, putting his head on his knees, his thoughts splintering when they came up against the image of Junta, fourteen years old and turning over for the first time the idea of a perfect game. Junta who now alone in his room would hear Kazuki begging him to come to the parking lot and hear only that a mystery he’d childishly preserved had been resolved. The unfinished structure where he’d made a promise had its own function and countless others would move through a place he’d thought to be a destination revealing it to be only another point of a journey. He would put his hands on his knees as Kazuki did now, and like Kazuki did now he would cry for it, that summer night that had begun so beautifully and now was only another memory he’d kept the key to, holding that flimsy thing close rather than following Kazuki into a place where they might have nothing at all.  

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 minutes before**

* * *

 

 

 

 

He could see Kazuki leaving the dugout and he moved forward because he had nothing to give back, and he’d taken too long to wake up, and when Kazuki grabbed him the way he had when he was fourteen years old he couldn’t help but sob anyway, because it was their entitlement and because he hadn’t earned them even that much. “I’m sorry—“ he kept saying. “I’m very, very sorry—“ not only for the game, but for all the days to come. “I can’t—I still need—“ Kazuki’s hand cupped the back of his head. 

“Stop thinking about that,” said Kazuki. “You can—“

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **3 minutes after**

* * *

 

 

 

 

The rain was stopping. Junta was still red-eyed and Kazuki’s head was buzzing with a terrible white noise but they came out into the tepid sunlight anyway, putting one foot in front of the other. This was the world, then, when you had lost: nothing the same as before. But there were some differences that—Junta’s shoulders under his, Junta’s eyes that had looked straight at him as he said what he’d wanted. He wanted to see it again, the grown person who had looked him in the eyes. 

A light wind was blowing and the way it hit the tears on his cheeks made it seem like it was autumn. That was good, then: it didn’t feel like summer anymore. He took one step, and then another. He wasn’t afraid.

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **zero**

* * *

 

 

 

 

“Stop thinking about that,” said Kazuki. “You can give it back to me when you want. You don’t have to—not now, and not—even if we couldn’t throw a perfect game, or the game you wanted—“

 

 

 

 

* * *

  **zero**

* * *

 

 

 

 

Junta said, “No, we—we did.”

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

_the end_


End file.
